It was Democratic operatives who thought it would be a good idea to ditch Bernie Sanders just when he was really catching fire, and bet it all on the "safe" Hillary Clinton (who turns out to have been not "safe" at all, and represented a truly disastrous decision for both the Dems and the entire United States of America).

We had a preview of same here in Wisconsin in 2014's gubernatorial run-up, when the local Democratic geniuses had the opportunity to throw their weight behind firebrand speaker (and farmer! from the rural west of Wisconsin!) Kathleen Vinehout, a woman who was more than willing to take Scott Walker to the woodshed and call him on every single bit of bullshit he dribbled out (and, since nearly everything Walker says is bullshit, imagine how fun to watch it would have been). But noooooo.

Instead, they groomed Trek bicycle executive Mary Burke to take on Walker, ostensibly because her wealth and ties to the business community would somehow endear her to Walker backers. Epic fail. Burke, who had no stomach for confrontation, let the nasty, vindictive Walker walk all over her (pun intended). And we got a preview of the presidential race, when angry voters in rural Wisconsin--the same ones who swung the state for Trump--refused to abandon "their boy," Scott Walker... because he had given those highfalutin teachers and state workers what-for.

Economist Jake at one of my favorite blogs, Jake's Economic TA Funhouse, really has the whole thing nailed down. It's not just Katherine Cramer's "politics of resentment" (although I couldn't agree with Cramer more); equally important in the long history of Democratic failure against the far right is that the Democrats no longer have a coherent message (a failure that can be laid directly at the feet of their so-called leadership--see above).

No matter how unrealistic, racist or flat-out lying GOPs are, at least these individuals [rural and/or blue-collar voters] think they are getting an answer from them, whereas Dems are shrugging and saying “You know, if you retrain yourself, you might get a slightly better-paying job if some other newer technology comes in to your town.” Or even stating a fact like “hey, this Obamacare is great and more people are getting covered” when Joe Ruralguy was already covered, and now his insurance company is using the excuse of “Obamacare” to continue to jack up his rates or deductibles. That’s not what people want to hear, that’s not relating to their particular situation, and that’s not what they should expect to get as a reply from their elected officials.

You need to reach into people’s lives, and give them hope that there will be a reward to their hard work. They can see that corporate slimeballs and rich donors take more and more while the blue-collars work as hard as ever and fall further behind, so why don’t Dems STEP UP AND SAY “THIS SITUATION IS WRONG AND UNACCEPTABLE”?

Also, why aren’t Dems telling rural Wisconsin that the reward to investing taxes into public schools is because it makes for a better community that their kids would want to stick around in and raise their new families in. Instead, Republicans rob those schools of funding to funnel money into unaccountable voucher schools in big cities and suburbs, to subsidize schools that those parents are already sending their kids to. Maybe we should point out that being a decent person who pays their bills and believes in honest and clean government is an ethos that still has value in the 2010s, and that politicians should reward those values when they get into office.

Instead, the Anson Kayes and the rest of the suit-wearing consultant class say “Well, that’s not going to happen. big Big money is just the way the system is these days. Sorry about that, try this subpar option, since us urban educated types know the better way for you to succeed.” And you wonder why this party keeps losing when party hacks like that continue to pull fat paychecks from candidates as “experts”?

DEAR GOD Dems, clean house and throw these losers out!

Amen.

We need to face facts. Americans have become a civics-challenged bunch. We are sated with our gadgets and our reality TV--which is why a reality TV star is now our President, and why, like most reality TV stars, he doesn't have the faintest idea of how to improve the lot of lower-income Americans. The GOP has coasted on this tide until it rules damned near everything--never mind that even a cursory examination of the facts (see Speaker of the House Paul Ryan) quickly illustrates that the GOP wants nothing more than an early death for the people who put them into office (again, see "politics of resentment"). We need to make the common man and woman in this country come to grips with actual reality. Beating up on teachers and snow-plow drivers and minor bureaucrats is not going to better anyone's lot in life. We need to show Americans who the real enemy is--and that would be the paymasters of the Paul Ryans and Scott Walkers. There's your agenda, Democrats. Now get to work, or get lost--while the rest of us create a real opposition party.

THOUGHTS ON IMMIGRATION: Boy, it's been a long time since I agreed with Mitch Berg on anything.

Mitch and I go way, way back... as a matter of fact, he was one of the original voices that inspired me to start blogging (which means, of course, that his blog is even older than mine, which certainly makes it one of the very oldest on the Internetz). At that time, immediately post-9/11, he was one of the brave conservative voices speaking out to help pull our country together against a common enemy (he also was, and still is, an accomplished historian and not too bad of a music writer, as well as being a fellow guitarist). Mitch, Michele Catalano, and Charles Johnson were daily reads for me. Charles has morphed into an angry leftist. I have no idea what Michele is doing these days, but I don't think she's blogging. And Mitch? When the GOP went off the deep end, Mitch went right along with 'em. Hell, he was even willing to support Scott Walker for president. I still read Mitch's blog out of a probably misplaced sense of duty, and because I think it's good to read people you don't necessarily agree with. But mostly, it's painful--especially if you read the comments, an endless circle jerk among alt-rightists and gun freaks. Or when Mitch bemoans the fact that he lives in librul Minnesota and not Walker-GOP-throttled Wisconsin (I've noticed that he hasn't moved across the river, though, even if he could live in Hudson, WI and still commute to his job in St. Paul if he was the true believer he paints himself as).

So there's your introduction.

Mitch has long had an alter-ego on his blog called "Joe Doakes from Como Park," who e-mails him daily with pithy (and usually lengthy) comments. Let's just say that if Joe Doakes isn't Mitch, he's his long-lost brother from another mother.

I don't agree with everything "Joe" says, but I agree with most of it.

Let's start by saying that I am not as upset as many liberals are by President Trump's order that halts immigration from countries that are known hotbeds for Islamic terrorism (although it pisses me off that Saudi Arabia, the country that nurtured the terrorists that brought us 9/11, is conspicuously absent--OIL cough cough cough). Why in the hell do we want these people here? For what? If any of these countries had a long and reliable history of producing patriotic Americans (like the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, and many other once-despised immigrant groups), I might reconsider. But what we're getting is terrorists and people who hate our culture and our way of life. I'm perfectly aware that some immigrants from these countries may make perfectly fine Americans. It's the rest who worry me.

Folks, we can't be letting folks from these hostile nations into our country until we have a very thorough idea of exactly who they are and what they stand for. That is our RIGHT as a sovereign nation. We are under NO obligation to grant citizenship or permanent-resident status to people who hate the United States of America, or those who have no intention of respecting our laws and culture.

I feel more kindly toward the Mexicans, who for the most part are able and willing to integrate into American society. But I don't want any Mexican gangsters here, and I don't want Mexicans here who feel that we are obligated to speak Spanish and overhaul our culture to accommodate theirs. If I was to emigrate to Canada or Poland (just picking out two nations that I admire), my first order of business would be to remake myself into the very best Canadian or Pole I could possibly be. Yes, I would probably seek out the company of other American emigres because we would have so much in common. But I would never forget my debt to my host country, and it would certainly never occur to me to insist that native Canadians or Poles remake themselves in my image.

All I am asking is this: If you want to come to America, you should be ready to become an American. If you want to be a Somali or a Mexican who has an American address but no respect for our culture, please stay home. And, as Mitch would say, that is all.

THEY WERE FORGOTTEN: Reader(s) may have already gathered that I am not a fan of President Trump. There are about a million reasons why I am not, starting with the fact that I went to high school near New York City and later lived in the city for 7 years--so I am more familiar with The Donald than most Americans. It's not that the man has never done any good things; it's just that with The Donald, it's always about him and I don't think that's a very good trait in a President (it also applied to Obama but in a much more limited sense--and it wasn't a good thing then either).

I choose to believe that, on some level, Donald Trump does care about all those blue-collar Americans who sent him to the White House. He's certainly not like Hillary, who could never stand to be around working people (witness all her meet-n'-greets with wealthy donors) where Trump would take selfies with crazed Green Bay Packers fans wearing cheeseheads.

Here's the problem: Hillary Clinton knows full well about the plight of working Americans and what caused it (a lot of that had to do with her husband) and probably could think of a couple of ways to make their lot better. But she doesn't care, because she's all about the dollar bill--witness her coziness with Wall Street.

And assuming as I do that Donald Trump really does care, his unique brand of self-centered cluelessness more or less guarantees that he isn't going to do much for Joe and Janie Lunchbox either. Want proof? If The Donald had any idea about how to improve the lot of the working class, he 1) never would have picked Koch stooge Mike Pence as his Vice President; 2) would keep even more dangerous Koch stooge (i.e. as in Speaker of the House) Paul Ryan on a very, very, very short leash--this is, after all, the man who wants to gut Social Security and Medicare, to say nothing of Obamacare; 3) would never have even thought of dismantling the protections that could serve as a stopgap against Wall Street ushering in another global financial meltdown.

I am beginning to feel bad for American workers who voted for Trump, because I do not believe that everybody needs to be a swell college-educated know-it-all who lives in Seattle or New York and drinks ten-dollar cups of coffee* to have their opinion count in the American conversation. I do know that life improved for those kinds of folks under the Obama presidency--because it is those kinds of folks who ushered Obama into the White House (twice) and saw their stock portfolios grow and grow while he was President. But Obama wasn't known to spend so much time in, say, Sharon PA or Huntington WV or Spokane WA--blue-collar towns where people were hurting, and hurting badly. Hillary Clinton showed zero interest in those Americans too. Only Bernie Sanders was talking to them, and the Democratic National Committee stripped away his chance of being President by throwing all their weight behind Hillary.

So go and figure why these desperate people threw in their lot with Trump. It really doesn't matter in the end that they have probably been hoodwinked (I am still hoping that Trump at least restrains Paul Ryan from leaving working Americans literally dying in the streets, because I know that Ryan would like to do just that). But I do know that Trump needs to distance himself from the dipshit wing of the Republican party, the Scott Walkers and Sam Brownbacks and Bobby Jindals and Paul Ryans, because these monsters represent the complete antithesis of helping working-class America get back onto its feet--the very idea that propelled Trump into the White House, and one that I think is a worthy idea (for all that almost all liberal pundits disagree with me).

Working-class Americans have been excluded from the American discussion for far too long, and that is exactly the reason why we now have to deal with a Trump presidency. For all of you armchair liberals, "funsters" with your mountain-bike racks and cushy geek jobs, ultrarich assholes who don't care a whit about your suffering countrymen--the rent has come due. And don't say you didn't see it coming.

*full disclosure: I am a college-educated know-it-all who has lived in both Seattle and New York, though you won't ever see me paying ten bucks for a cup of coffee.

I AM THE MIDDLE: Pratically anything you read about the state of American politics these days will use the words "polarized" and/or "polarization" at least once.

And it's true that the American electorate seems to have morphed into two camps of roughly equal sizes. There is the modern-day GOP, which has devolved from the "neocons" of George W. Bush's day into a nasty fever swamp of Koch-funded oligarchs and robber barons, alt-right ultranationalists and neo-Nazis, anti-government teabaggers and secessionists, Jesus-challenged evangelicals, and the large bloc of Trumpists--mostly blue-collar white people who feel that they've been screwed by the power structure (and they have). Then there are the "progressives," which include, in addition to the various identity-bloc cartels and appeaseniks of all stripes, a new group that includes anyone in the country who refuses to pledge allegiance to the GOP. Nowhere is that seen more clearly than in states like Wisconsin, where for six years now anyone who dared speak against the all-GOP regime is either completely ignored or (if they get too vocal) tagged as an enemy of the state. I now find myself in the "progressive" camp, but that's not because I'm really a "progressive" so much as a citizen who refused to drink the WiGOP Kool-Aid. There's a lot of items on the progressive agenda that I won't carry water for. For one thing, I refuse to subscribe to identity politics; as far as I'm concerned we Americans are all in this together and I lose respect for you when you feel the need to put a descriptor and a hyphen in front of "American." In essence, that implies that you're just a little bit better than the rest of us, or that you require special attention.

And I'm tired of hearing about "white privilege." I have, as a white man, the same target on my back as anyone else in the "other 99%"--and I've got decades of financial torment to prove it, courtesy of our ruling class. Ask your neighborhood Trumpist what a great privilege it is to be white these days.

Then there are "microaggressions," a term I hadn't even heard until last year. Actually the term implies its own definition--these are slights so small or so unintentional that the pre-Millenial generations would not have even registered them. Remedy? How about growing a spine.

This blog is a pretty thorough document of how I became disillusioned with the conservative movement over the course of several years, but I still cannot find a home with the progressives except inasfar as they are fighting the WiGOP along with me.

And here's the reason why: I am the center. Remember us? We were the Americans who tried to see wisdom on both sides of the fence, and who voted accordingly. Those people don't exist in places like Wisconsin anymore--the last public figure was State Sen. Dale Schultz, who was basically run out of town on a rail.

And then there are a smattering of people like me, but we don't talk politics to anyone anymore because chances are excellent that we will arouse the ire of one or the other extremist camp.

Welcome to today's America. Thanks a lot, GOP. And thanks a lot, Dems--you had a hand in it too by playing to all the lowest-common-denominators listed above.